Congratulations to Amit Varma

...for winning the Bastiat Prize 2007!

This comes not just from me but separately from The Middle Stage itself, as Amit used to write it till he generously allowed me to take it over in April 2005. Amit, your old blog wants to know if it can persuade you to return!

Manish Vij of Ultrabrown has a photograph here of Amit looking resplendent in a suit, in the company of wife and candlestick.

Travelling with Graham Robb

Apologies for how static this site has been all month, but this actually portends a good thing in my life, because after months of being home and sitting at my desk every day I have been travelling. Yesterday, on a halt in Delhi, I contemplated the pleasant shape of my broad semi-circle around the top half of the country, from Bombay to Delhi to Kolkata and back with stops in Dehradun, Bhubaneswar and Kharagpur. Some quick sums in my tattered notebook put the figure at about seven thousand kilometres over road and rail in two weeks.

And as it happens I’ve found the perfect book to accompany me on my travels: Graham Robb’s fabulous new work The Discovery of France. Robb’s area of specialisation is eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, but thus far he has always threaded his interest in social history through literature: his books on Rimbaud and Balzac are among the finest contemporary examples of the genre of literary biography.

His new book takes the reader into the mental and physical universe of the millions of faceless people who, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were at the work of “discovering France” – gradually working their way into a sense of a world larger than that of their immediate village and province. The word pays, Robb observes, is translated today as “country” but it derives from pagus, or the area controlled by a tribe, and refers not so much to the abstract nation but to a smaller region that people thought of as home: "A pays was the area in which everything was familiar...To someone with little experience of the world, the pays could be measured in fields and furrows."

The France of this time was not "French" in any recognizable sense (just as people living on the Indian subcontinent had no sense of what the term "Indian" might mean). People's affiliations were to local places and traditions, local deities and saints, dialects highly specific to their town or village, local laws and strictures. People lived in a world where life spans were far shorter than they are today, yet the sense of time passing was far more burdensome and made life feel longer.

The limits of their universe were by the standards of our times highly circumscribed. "Until the invention of cheap bicycles," writes Robb, who himself went across France on a bicycle for his book, "the known universe, for most people, had a radius of less than fifteen miles." News of the wider world arrived on the tongues of pedlars, pilgrims, and smugglers; people lived at the mercy of disease, poverty, epidemics and catastrophes. “Life for most people was a game of snakes-and-ladders with very short snakes and very long ladders.”

Even where there were broadly shared traditions of heritage and culture, these were more obvious to outsiders than to the people themselves. France was in effect a country waiting to be discovered by its own citizens, each one of whom knew a part intimately but had only the dimmest conception of the whole.

The human relationship with the divine inspires some of Robb’s best observations. Although most of the country was nominally Roman Catholic, religious practices (as in, say, Hinduism) owed as much to pagan rituals and local customs as to any overriding theology. And the god or saint who resided in the village church or shrine was seen as a personal, embodied deity not interchangeable with those of neighbouring villages. Heavenly beings in this world, writes Robb, “were no more cosmopolitan than their worshippers.”

Robb's refulgent book reminds us powerfully of the attractions of the regional and the local in our age of globalism. Its highly detailed account of patterns of trade and migration, pilgrim routes and smuggling networks, religious traditions and proverbial and folkloric wisdom, burrows out a world loosely stitched together in motley colours, on the cusp of earthshaking changes (the railways, the telegraph, the newspaper) that would alter its sense of itself for good. It is very easy to import an Indian (or some other personal) parallel into hundreds of observations that Robb makes: his loving attention to the French past rouses us to think about our own remote familial and regional past. I'll just quote a paragraph in closing to give some sense of the richness of detail of his text. This passage seems to me to beautifully marry fact with feeling:

These seasonal migrants were once a more obvious presence, in towns as well as the countryside. On certain days, the main squares of towns and cities filled up at dawn with hundreds of families who had walked through the night with their sickles wrapped in spare clothes. The markets were known as loues or louées. Harvesters wore ears of corn, shephers sported tufts of wool and carters hung whips around their necks. Domestic servants wore their best clothes and carried a distinctive bouquet or some foliage to serve as indentification. The employer would make them walk up and down to prove that they were not crippled and inspect their hands for the calluses that showed that they were hard workers. A coin placed in the hand sealed the contract. As the day wore on, the crowd of hopefuls became smaller, older and more decrepit. Those that remained at the very end of the day might follow the harvest anyway as gleaners, covering hundreds of miles in a month or two before returning home.

Update, July 18, 2008: Claire Armitstead on The Discovery of France after it was awarded the Ondaatje Prize ("The unifying concept of the book is mobility - or, in many areas of provincial France and for most of its history, the lack of it. Therein lies the irony of being a cyclist historian of the 21st century: in its early days, the bicycle was all about speeding things up, about making distances seem smaller, and communities closer. Now, in the era of transnational autoroutes, its great virtue is slowing things down, enabling the researcher to note the particularity of people and places...")

Some recent reviews

As I have lots and lots of work to take care of, and then more lots once those first lots are over, I haven't been able to write a post this week.

But here are links to some recent reviews for Mint: on Akbar Ahmed's Journey Into Islam, Nalini Jones's debut collection of stories What You Call Winter, Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great, and Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion.

On looking through Ted Hughes's Selected Translations

Two things need to be noted at the outset about the new volume of Ted Hughes's Selected Translations, a selection that includes poems from the entire range of the European tradition, from Aeschylus, Euripides, Ovid, and Seneca to sections of the medieval long poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to the moderns: Lorca, Eluard, Yehuda Amichai, János Pilinszky and Yves Bonnefoy.

One is that, unlike most translators, who are comfortably multilingual or at the very least bilingual, Hughes was far more at home in English than in any other language: in producing these translations he often worked with preliminary versions produced by collaborators or sometimes by the poets themselves (such as those of his contemporary Amichai, a close friend). And secondly - and perhaps following naturally from Hughes's position, his particular competency as well as his limitations - is his minimalist, literalist theory of translation, reflected not only in these poems but explicitly articulated in the editorials he wrote for the influential journal Modern Poetry in Translation, which he founded in 1965 with Daniel Weissbort.

If Hughes was not among those skeptics and naysayers who believe that poetry is always lost in translation, he also believed that there was nothing to be gained by a certain kind of translation: one in which a translator is not so much a conduit as an active player. In an editorial for the third number of MPT (1967) he wrote that he and Weissbort held that in translation "the first ideal is literalness. The very oddity and struggling dumbness of word for word versions is what makes our own imagination jump."

In the 1982 edition of MPT he wrote, looking back, that instead of translations that somehow domesticised the original, "we favoured the translations that best revealed the individuality and strangeness of the original. This usually meant a translation that interposed the minimum of the reflexes and inventions of the translator….We were happily resigned, that is, to all the losses sustained by the most literal translation of the verbal sense. Most often, oddly enough, we found the closest thing [to the ideal] in translations made by poets whose first language is not English, or by scholars who did not regard themselves as poets….Yehuda Amichai seemed good in any translation, but the best, the most touching and haunting, were by himself."

Whatever the problems with this approach - and note that in emphasising a scrupulous word-for-word fidelity to the original, Hughes does not simultaneously call for a similarly close rendition of the poem's form, which is arguably as much a site of its meaning as its language - I took a great deal of pleasure in dipping into this beautifully produced and meticulously annotated volume (the notes are by Weissbort) and found lots of poems in it that I liked, some by poets I'd never read before.

Here is one, "Harbach 1944", by János Pilinszky, translated by Hughes from a crib made by the poet János Csokits. Pilinzsky (1921-1981), a Hungarian, saw from up close the horrors of the Second World War, doing time in German prison camps. His poem evokes, in a series of unforgettable images, the spectacle of a band of exhausted and doomed labourers working at night - a memory that, as the first line asserts, the speaker has never been able to leave behind:

Harbach 1944

At all times I see them.
The moon brilliant. A black shaft looms up.
Beneath it, harnessed men
haul an immense cart.

Dragging that giant wagon
which grows bigger as the night grows
their bodies are divided among
the dust, their hunger and their trembling.

They are carrying the road, they are carrying the land,
the bleak potato fields,
and all they know is the weight of everything,
the burden of the skylines

and the falling bodies of their companions
which almost grow into their own
as they lurch, living layers,
treading each other's footsteps.

The villages stay clear of them,
the gateways withdraw.
The distance, that has come to meet them,
reels away back.

Staggering, they wade knee deep
in the low, darkly muffled clatter
of their wooden clogs
as through invisible leaf litter.

Already their bodies belong to silence.
And they thrust their faces towards the height
as if they strained for a scent
of the faraway celestial troughs

because, prepared for their coming
like an opened cattle-yard,
its gates flung savagely back,
death gapes to its hinges.

The faraway celestial troughs, death with its gates "flung savagely back" - these scything images are a reminder to us prose writers that we should always read poetry. Regular encounters with the intensity and concision of verse serve to discipline our work, our forms which encourage and allow for expansion, and can sometimes lead to us making lazy choices of words or phrases in the knowledge that there are masses of other words to distract the reader's attention.

And here is a very different kind of suffering - a lack with which the speaker has more or less made his peace - in Hughes's translation (in collaboration with Antonela Glavinic) of the Bosnian poet Abdulah Sidran's "A Blind Man Sings To His City":

A Blind Man Sings To His City

The rain stops. Now from the drains,
From the attics, from under the floorboards
Of the shattered homes in the suburbs
Oozes the stench of the corpses
Of mice. I walk seeking
No special meaning in this. A blind man,
To whom it has been given to see
Only what others don't. This
Makes up for my deprivation: in the south wind
That touches me I recognise the voices
Of those who left this city. As if they were crying.
There, scent of the linden trees, close.
I know
The bridge is near, where my step and my stick
Will ring differently - more light
In the sound.There, now, right by my ear
Two flies mate in the air.
It will be scorching hot again
Bodies
Brush past me,hot
Smelling of bed, smelling of lust. I walk muttering
To God, as if He were beside me:
'Surely nobody in this city
Better than me - better than me, God,
To whom you have given never to see
The face he loves.'

I like very much the absolute certainty (and the rhyme) of "There, now, right by my ear/Two flies mate in the air" as well as the closing lines, both plaintive and gruff, aggressive and defensive. The blind man says that he has never been given the opportunity to see the face of God, but surely he knows that even those blessed with sight do not get to see the face of God either. One might propose then that his meaning is angular: the face of God is the world itself, from which he is walled off by his blindness even though he is part of the same order of creation.

An essay by Hughes on János Pilinszky can be found here, and some more translations of Pilinzsky's poems by Michael Castro and Gabor Gyukics here. You might also want to read Lajos Koncz's essay "Ted Hughes and János Pilinszky". An exchange between Daniel Weissbort and David McDuff on issues of translation in The New York Review of Books in 1982 is here. Some more poems from Selected Translations are here, including the very fine “O fold me away between blankets . . .” by Mário de Sá Carneiro.

And an old post about another fine Hungarian poet - "The despair of Attila Jozsef" - and two recent posts on other poets in translation: Constantine Cavafy and Wislawa Szymborska.

In Pragati

My essay "Mark Tully and India" reappears today in the October issue of Pragati.

Moving house

I'm moving house this week, and as all of you who've ever had to move house must know, its an exceedingly timetaking and backbreaking job, especially when there are a few thousand books to think about. So I won't be able to post anything for a few days. Back next week.

On Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul

My review of Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul appeared last weekend in the Sunday Telegraph.

If Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, the two best-known Turkish novelists in the English-speaking world, have one virtue in common, it is that both have persistently interrogated their country's self-image, contrasting the narrowness of Turkism with the cosmopolitanism of the old Ottoman empire. Both have gone on trial, too, under an infamous article of the Turkish Penal Code for the crime of "insulting Turkishness". In terms of their viewpoints there is not much to choose between them. Shafak's latest novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, shows her though to be a more attack-minded and perhaps less sophisticated novelist than her great contemporary.

Shafak's novel drives the distant past into the path of the heedless present through a multi-generational narrative, and it addresses explicitly a controversial episode in Turkish history, the massacre of perhaps a million Armenians by Ottoman forces in 1915-16. The bastard of Istanbul is Asya Kazanci, the illegitimate child of one of four headstrong sisters who live together as one family - the Kazanci men having an unfortunate habit of dying young. Asya does not know who her father is and has been taught not to bother with trying to find out; she is similarly indifferent to her country's history.

The single living Kazanci man, Asya's uncle Mustapha, has settled in America and married a divorcée of Armenian descent. When Mustapha's step-daughter, Armanoush, arrives suddenly in Istanbul on a search for her family's roots, the Kazanci women are forced to accept the truth that the novel dramatises, which is that "the past is anything but bygone". Thus, Shafak's double-sided narrative demonstrates how the Armenian diaspora and the Turkish people live in different time frames, one community still nursing the wounds of old crimes, the other living in a present that accepts no responsibility for the past.

Yet it could be said that, on balance, Shafak's novel is not all that novelistic. Its characters lack true freedom and interiority and can seem mere symbols or meanings fitted into an overarching structure. Indeed, one suspects that what seems to be a problem with Shafak's theory of character may really have to do with her choice of language. Shafak is that rarity, a bilingual novelist; she began writing novels in Turkish, but this is her second novel in English.

Yet deadly flat sentences such as: 'If her passion for books had been one fundamental reason behind her recurring inability to sustain a standard relationship with the opposite sex...' raise doubts about whether even a novelist as gifted as Shafak possesses the understanding and intuition to successfully dramatise her ideas in two languages.

And an old post: on Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red.

Necessary and unnecessary steps in Constantine Cavafy

No matter how many times one has read the poems of Constantine Cavafy, to come back to them again, after all those encounters with others books, other poems, is to be taken once again by surprise. "Sadly I see the ladder of poetry/reaches high, so very high" complains the novice poet to a more experienced one in Cavafy's poem "The First Step". "Unhappily for me, I'll never climb higher/ than this first step where I stand." Of course Cavafy went well past that first step, all the way up the ladder: those who think him the twentieth century's greatest poet are not few in number. But it is worth noting, as an example of Cavafy's practicality and clearsightedness, that even this poem about a poet fretful about his lack of progress beyond one step ends with the older poet's wise counsel: "Even this first step/is a long way from ordinary people./..../You've reached here, no small feat. Just what you have done is a great glory."

This is among the sentiments that emerge most powerfully from Cavafy's poetry: that setting out on one's own requires unusual courage, and even the person who has taken only the first step has done something truly worthy, for he has knowingly made himself an outsider, exposed himself to the gaze of those very same "ordinary people" with whom he has broken (this idea carries a particular charge in Cavafy's poetry because he was homosexual). Here is the thought again in the poem "Growing Strong", taken from Aliki Barnstone's fine new translations of Cavafy:

Growing Strong

He who wishes to strengthen his spirit,
must abandon reverence and submission.
He will honor some laws,
but mostly he will break both law and custom,
and he will stray from the accepted, inadequate straight path.
He will be taught much by sensual pleasures.
He will not fear the destructive act;
half the house must be torn down.
This way he will grow virtuously towards knowledge.

How easy and economical the poem is: it seems almost to write itself from the first line onward, and it is resolutely unmetaphorical - Cavafy always choses understatement over ornament. The effect of the poem lies almost totally in the varying force and strength of the individual lines, which give us the sense of a voice thinking aloud, its pitch rising and falling (note the work done by the words "will" and "must", and the slightly self-satisfied and therefore self-ironising air - "virtuously" - of the tidy close, the only line of the poem that is also a complete sentence). And observe also that Cavafy is never the advocate of total, all-consuming revolution, whether in personal life or in politics: even here he says, of the person who wishes to grow strong, that "He will honor some laws" and "half the house must be torn down".

Cavafy's insistence that we not be afraid of "the destructive act" goes hand in hand with a respect for tradition: politically he was a conservative and not a radical. His poem "In A Large Greek Colony, 200 BCE", although set two thousand years in the past, seems to speak directly to the twentieth century and its totalitarian horrors with its message that nobody is as likely to repeat the errors of history as those who want to sweep away all of history. This is Barnstone's version:

In A Large Greek Colony, 200 BCE

There is not the slightest doubt
that things in the Colony don't go as one would wish,
and though we move forward, anyway,
perhaps, as not a few think, the time has come
for us to bring in a Political Reformer.

Yet the obstacle and difficulty
is that they make a big deal
out of everything, these Reformers.
(It would be a stroke of good luck
if one never needed them.) Everything,
every little thing, they ask about and examine,
and instantly radical reforms come to mind
and they demand they be implemented without delay.

They lean toward sacrifice.
Give up that property of yours,
your owning it is risky:
such possessions are harmful to the Colonies.
Give up that income
and that coming from it.
and this third one, as a natural consequence.
They are essential, but it can't be helped;
They create an adverse liability for you.

And as they proceed in their inspection,
they find (then find again) needless things,
which they demand must go—
things that are nevertheless hard to dismiss.

And when, with good luck, they finish their work,
having ordered and pared everything down to the last detail,
they leave, taking away their rightful wages, as well.
We'll see what remains, after
so much expert surgery.

Perhaps the time had not yet come.
Let's not rush; haste is a dangerous thing.
Premature measures bring reget.
Certainly, and unfortunately, there is much disorder in the Colony.
But is there anything human without imperfection?
And, anyway, look, we're moving forward.

As Edward Said notes in his book On Late Style, in Cavafy "the future does not occur, or if it does, it has in a sense already happened. Better the internalized, narrow world of limited expectations than that of grandiose projects constantly betrayed or traduced." (Said's five or six pages on Cavafy make up probably the best passage of the book. He also writes: "One of Cavafy's greatest achievements is to render the extremes of lateness, physical crisis, and exile in forms and situations and above all in a style of remarkable inventiveness and lapidary calm.") Lapidary is exactly the word for Cavafy.

Barnstone's work compares favourably with the standard English translation of Cavafy: the Collected Poems by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Although her lines often depart only slightly from those by Keeley and Sherrard, sometimes they produce an improved tone. Here is a comparison of two versions of one of my favourite Cavafy poems, the plangent and totally unforgettable "Voices":

Voices

Ideal and loved voices
of the dead, or of those
lost to us like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us in dreams;
sometimes the brain hears them in thought.

And, for one moment, with their sounds,
sounds come back from the first poetry of our lives—
like music at night, remote, fading away.

(translated by Aliki Barnstone)

Voices

Voices, loved and idealized,
of those who have died, or of those
lost for us like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us in dreams;
sometimes deep in thought the mind hears them.

And with their sound for a moment return
sounds from our life’s first poetry—
like music at night, distant, fading away.

(translated by Keeley and Sherrard)

Though there is not much to choose between them, I find I prefer the opening of the first, with its simpler formulations and fewer pauses making for a graver sound. On the other hand, Keeley and Sherrard have a smoother close, while Barnstone's version has the word "sounds" twice one upon the other, which to some ears might sound jarring as it does to mine.

Some more translations from Barnstone's book are available here and here, and the entire set of Keeley and Sherrard translations here. Here are some of my own choices: "Body, Remember", "Candles", "He Asked About The Quality", "But The Wise Perceive Things About To Happen", "Waiting For The Barbarians", "Since Nine O'Clock", and "The God Abandons Antony".

Also, the writer André Aciman compares four different translations of Cavafy's poem "The City" in an essay called "Translating Cavafy". And there is a large selection of essays on the theory and practice of translation in this old Middle Stage post.

On VS Naipaul's A Writer's People

A shorter version of this piece on VS Naipaul's A Writer's People appears today in the Observer.

The path leading up to VS Naipaul's A Writer's People is littered with a writer's rubble: the debris, that of canonical figures knocked off their pedestals. Henry James: "that dreadful American man…the worst writer in the world actually." Thomas Hardy: "an unbearable writer…doesn't know how to compose a paragraph." Ernest Hemingway: "didn't know where he was, ever, really." EM Forster's A Passage To India: "it has only one real scene, and that's the foolish little tea party at the beginning." Jane Austen: "If the country had failed in the nineteenth century no one would have been reading Jane Austen."

These slashing denunciations provoked the question: if not these, then who were this writer's people? But as it turns out, Naipaul's reading has been as ambitious as the peregrinations through the decolonised world which marked the second phase of his career, after the success of his early novels. The essays of his book encompass figures as disconnected in time, space and reputation as Flaubert, Derek Walcott, Mahatma Gandhi, Anthony Powell, Polybius, Virgil, the Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon, and Naipaul's own father Seepersad. These are writers who have struck him in some way with their "ways of looking and feeling".

Naipaul's operative idea through the book is not so much prose style (though naturally he has his preferences there) but something larger, more numinous: a quality he calls "vision". For him how well a writer "sees" is what makes his work forceful, ageless, truthful. Those who see clearly bring to their work some original perception of the world, do not merely imitate established forms, treasure precision, avoid rhetoric. Bad writers are verbose and tend to over-explain; even worse, they are often intellectually dishonest.

For instance, Naipaul finds both good and bad things in Flaubert. He praises the style of Madame Bovary. Even though Flaubert's reputation is that of an ambitious, even self-flagellating stylist, the language of his great novel is "plain and clean and brief". Indeed, the continuous pleasure and surprises of its details are in stark contrast to the straining and languor of Flaubert's historical novel Salammbô. There the novelist's determination to parade the fruits of his research "sets up a barrier between the reader and what is being described". The writing rings false because it is too detached, overstated, theatrical.

Similarly, Naipaul bestows warm praise - a Naipaulian warmth still a bit cold by the general standard, but exceptional from Naipaul - on Gandhi. The Autobiography of Gandhi is "direct and wonderfully simple"; the book is a masterpiece. Even Gandhi's petitions to the authorities were "concrete and precise, without rhetoric". But it is important to note that Gandhi the writer is inseparable from Gandhi the man, the man who learnt from his labours to see.

Naipaul's writing here reprises and builds upon the chapter on Gandhi in An Area of Darkness (1964), the first of his three books on India. In that book, too, the emphasis is on Gandhi's powers of discernment, his vision: "He looked at India as no Indian was able to; his vision was direct, and this directness was, and is, revolutionary….He sees the Indian callousness, the Indian refusal to see." The centrality of this verb see in Naipaul's idea of a writer's work is echoed in a slightly different, more paradoxical, way by Proust, who also imagines the writer as a kind of optical intrument that clarifies both self and society: "Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth."

Again, the young Gandhi, like the young Vidia, left the simple moral world and easy satisfactions of his provincial environment to voyage to England and seek a place in the world. Naipaul admires his diligence, his assiduous self-fashioning. Gandhi's travels, "first to England and then to South Africa, made him see that he had everything to learn. It was the basis of his great achievement." Naipaul compares Gandhi to the Buddha: "Both these men make wounding journeys." The reader may hear here the shadow of an allusion to Naipaul's own wounding journey from "the periphery to the centre".

As ever, Naipaul's sentences are tightly coiled and and muscular: they seem to be revealing something even when Naipaul is merely summarising. His recapitulation of the movement of a poem by Virgil - one that "celebrate[s] the physical world in an almost religious way…making us see and touch and feel at every point" - is as delectable as the poem itself. I enjoyed in particular section in which he recalls the years he supported himself by reviewing books. The concerns of this passage are mundane things like word counts, the ways of literary editors, factions and petty rivalries, the pleasure and the dread of seeing oneself in print - gossip that makes the day go by.

Of course, it is Naipaul's own "way of looking and feeling" - his pessimistic and controversial assessment of formerly colonised people confused and resentful, his depiction of an Islam as cloistered and oppressive as colonialism - that has made his work so controversial. A Writer's People also carries the breath of his olympian disdain, notably in the chapters on Walcott and Powell (the latter begins with this sentence: "This will not be an easy chapter for me to do"). But this is a thrilling tour through literature from a man who more than anybody else embodies what it means to be a writer.

An excerpt from Naipaul's chapter on Derek Walcott can be found here, an older essay called "On Being A Writer" here, and an essay on RK Narayan not included in this book here ("All languages have their own heritage, and English cannot easily escape its associations with English history, English manners, Shakespeare, Dickens, the Bible. Narayan cleansed his English, so to speak, of all these associations, cleansed it of everything but irony, and applied it to his own little India. His people can eat off leaves on a floor in a slum tenement, hang their upper-cloths on a coat stand, do all that in correct English, and there is no strangeness, no false comedy, no distance."). And I have always admired Naipaul's essay "The Universal Civilization", the rousing close of which I quote here:

It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don't imagine my father's parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.

Lastly, here is Amitava Kumar's lovely essay from six years ago, "A Notebook For Mr.Biswas".

And some other posts on Nobel laureates: Orhan Pamuk, Saul Bellow, and Wislawa Szymborska.

Mark Tully and India

This is the last of an informal four-part series on India to mark the 60th anniversary of Indian independence. The other three are "Jawaharlal Nehru as a writer of English prose", on Rajmohan Gandhi's biography of Mahatma Gandhi, and "The art of oratory, and the great speeches of modern India".

India can be a foreign correspondent's nightmare, very hard to get in its entirety even to those wholly committed to the search. The intense and irreplicable peculiarity of India - the residual presence of outdated modes of behaviour and thought from the days of the Raj, or the widely divergent experience of daily life along lines of caste and particularly gender, to take just two examples of how both the near and distant past continue to work on the present - is of course hard to miss for anybody except those totally habituated to it, but it can nevertheless perplex the intellect seeking to break it down into its constituent elements.

From this perspective, the books of Mark Tully are an especially noteworthy contribution to the literature on modern India. Indeed, because he has now spent the best part of four decades in close engagement with the country, because his travels as the BBC's Chief of Bureau have brought him in contact with all kinds of places and people, and because he is part-insider, part-outsider in a productive way, Tully is probably better tuned into India than most Indians, with their limited access to the great sprawl of their own country and its past.

Tully's latest book and perhaps last book on his adopted country, India's Unending Journey, is a work both off and on the beaten track. This is because, after a series of highly agile, capacious and erudite books about contemporary India, hospitable to all kinds of viewpoints, Tully has in closing written a volume that resembles the traditional "India's message to the world" book customarily written by well-meaning visitors.

In part this is because India's Unending Journey - there is something cliched about the title itself - is the most autobiographical of Tully's books, as also the most polemical. The balance between observed detail and overarching argument is different from that of Tully's previous books, and the writing is more clearly addressed to the western reader. Tully makes a critique of aspects of western life though the lens of India, and thus addresses two constituencies at one go. In some ways he flatters his adopted home at the expense of the civilization in which he grew up. Although Tully knows that India itself, with its manifold problems, has yet to find any kind of balance, the argument he extracts from the experience of "forty years of living in India" is how the West itself is now unbalanced, unquestioningly secular and meanly materialist.

In his youth Tully briefly trained to be a priest in the Church of England, and if anything the autobiographical tone of his new book explains why the question of religion, and the place of religion in an increasingly secular climate on the one hand and a radically shrunken world where previously hostile faiths are forced to co-exist on the other, lies at the heart of his work on India. For in India not only is it taken for granted that you believe in God (as a Goan priest tells Tully), in a way that is no longer so in Europe, but also the other, the stranger, is always in one's field of vision, forcing upon every citizen the imperative of co-existence.

It was in India, writes Tully, that he refined his understanding of religion and came to believe "that a universal God made far more sense rationally than one who limits his activities to Christians", which is the sense of exclusivity, of chosenness, that his upbringing and later his abortive training as a priest taught him and which is shared by dedicated believers of the three great monotheisms. This explains his position on two dominant strands of contemporary Indian thought: he feels equally distant from "a secularism which seems to respect no religion, and a nationalism which carries with it the danger of only respecting one". The view that "any cause that is not secular is illiberal, seems to be illiberal itself," he remarks (not surprisingly some of his critics in India have accused him of being a BJP sympathiser). The religiosity of Indians is clearly congenial to Tully's temperament (while in the west "Mammon is triumphant and God on the retreat"), as is the openness and syncretism of Hinduism, even if it has recently taken on a militant aspect.

For instance, in a beautiful essay called "Altered Altars" in his previous book, India In Slow Motion, Tully sets out with his partner, Gillian Wright, (best known to Indian readers as the translator of Shrilal Shukla's comic novel Raag Darbari), to investigate Goan Christianity four decades after the departure of the proselytising Portuguese. Under the Portuguese, Goa "was the headquarters of the mission to convert the Orient, and was often described as the Rome of the East". But on his visit Tully finds churchgoing tinted with all kinds of borrowings from Hinduism; social life has managed to liberalise doctrine. Where representatives of the Vatican once promoted a spirit of exclusivity, priests are now preoccupied with the necessity of making their church "an Indian church".

Tully attends different services around the state, and reports on the particularities of each one. Among the ways in which worship has taken on an Indian face, he notes, is in the relationship between believers and God. While the Portuguese had wanted to impress the Indians with the awesome majesty of "a God who lived on high", now typically the priest "became one with his parishioners worshipping a personal God, more a friend than a king". Tully confesses he is uncomfortable with these altered altars - "I came from the old tradition...I found it easier to worship God in majesty, rather than God the social worker who battles for the poor, or God the personal pal of the charismatics."

But everywhere in this essay and others in the book - on the history of the Sufi faith, on farmers's problems in Karnataka, on cyber-governance in Hyderabad, on the reinvention of Rama by the BJP - there is evidence of Tully's talent for what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called "thick description". Although the title India In Slow Motion is primarily a reference to the "peculiarly Indian form of bad governance" that has immiserated Indian people and retarded economic growth, it might also be understood as a metaphor for the writer's painstaking methods.

Tully's warming belief in his adopted country, or more precisely the best of what it has to offer, leads him to overestimate India. For instance, in India's Unending Journey he contrasts "our Western habit of seeing issues in black and white" with the Indian belief in balance and reconciliation. "If there is one thing I have learnt from India," he writes, reprising a hoary platitude, "it is to appreciate how little in life is totally black, or indeed, purely white."

This radically exaggerates the gap between western and Indian civilization. "Balance" may be an avowed ideal in India but it is clearly not a reality, and the secular temper of the West that Tully criticises often facilitates a reasoned discussion of issues without the shrillness, misplaced sense of superiority, and contempt for the rule of law that marks the contribution of aggressively religious organisations or people to Indian debates. It is hard to resist the suspicion that it is Tully's impatience with the west that makes him overturn the dominant paradigm. For even if Tully has learnt to appreciate from India how little in life is purely black or white, it can safely be said that there are millions of Indian people who themselves show no sign of having learnt this from their country, and whose faith, whose sense of their history, and attitudes towards their wider society constrict rather than enlarge their lives - which is the emphasis, for example, of VS Naipaul, the titles of whose works on India or Indian characters include the words "area of darkness", "wounded", and "half a life". Reading Tully, conversely, one might feel it is western civilization that has become an area of darkness. I don't think that day has come just yet.

We end, then, with two paradoxes. One is that Tully, by dint of his decades of travel and exceptional learning, has a more sophisticated sense of India and its past than many Indians, who cleave to exclusive and partial views of it. But two: because of its insistence on distilling the meanings of Indian civilization into simple assertions that don't hold up for very long, India's Unending Journey actually waters down a perspective on Indian life that is strongly made, even if never explicitly stated, by Tully's other distinguished books.

And here are two essays by Tully, "My unending journey through India" and "Still in slow motion".

Mathematics and rebellion in Nikita Lalwani's Gifted

I confess that when I first looked at Nikita Lalwani's Gifted I put it down quickly. This was because the first sentence on the back-cover blurb - "Rumi Vasu is ten years, five months, thirteen days, two hours, forty-two minutes and six seconds old" - seemed to me characteristic of a tendency of bad literary fiction the world over: the tendency towards irrelevant detail, which, like a reflection in a shop window, points back towards the narrator instead of establishing something significant about the character. This sentence appeared to me a particularly egregious instance of this, because for all its fastidious attention to specifics of time it becomes inaccurate even within the time taken to read it or think it.

I only looked at Gifted again when it was longlisted for the Booker Prize, but on reading it I have come around to thinking the judges have actually made a fairly astute choice. Regardless of whether it goes on to win a formal honour (it is pointless to think of novels primarily through the lens of prizes and awards) it is a sparky contribution to Indian letters. And it is so not only for its theme - which is that of the Indian family, and within it the characteristic tenor of parent-child relations, which tend to remain stagnant even as the child matures and finally becomes an adult - but also for the quality of its writing, which for large sections of the book is unusually precise and rich.

The protagonist of Gifted, Rumika Vasu or Rumi, is a child prodigy with a highly developed aptitude for mathematics, and her father, a university professor at Cardiff, is determined to make sure that she makes the best of her talent by passing her A-levels well before the appointed age and gaining entry into a place like Oxford. Early on in the book, when Rumi is just a child, she does not see her talent as a curse, only as a gift. The detail on the back cover about her age appears in the novel on page 17 of my Penguin edition, and it takes on a different quality there because it is Rumi herself who is shown computing it, as part of the patter of a host of charming thoughts about numbers:

She looked at her watch again. Now she was 10 years, 2 months, 13 days, 2 hours, 48 minutes and 4 seconds old. She sang the numbers song in her head. It was almost a lullaby, one she had known since she was a child, the tune working like a step graph with a line that rose and rose, then flattened out when it got to sixteen, ending with a comforting monotone. [...] The figures continued in her head...they were wholesome, even numbers, created through doubling alone. 32 and 32 are 64...128...256...512. Five hundred and twelve was a lovely number. Really friendly. It made her think of her dad's big, warm, open hands, the lined palms in which she used to put her face on Sunday mornings when he and her mum were in bed. He used to pretend those hands were crocodile jaws waiting to gobble her up. That had been when he hadn't been so obsessed with mental arithmetic and getting the right answer.

A long passage humming with mathematical thoughts ("Five hundred and twelve was a lovely number. Really friendly" is to my ear a beautiful touch) ends with a slight grumble of complaint about the consequences of that mathematics in Rumi's family life. Even as they establish a present reality, unfolding spontaneously in the protagonist's lively mind, the details foreshadow what is to come.

Immigrant life in Cardiff is depressing; the burden of being the class geek troubling; the small social circle of the Vasis, further restricted by Mahesh to ensure his daughter's discipline, boring. Rumi daydreams often of her family's previous visit to India, where the visits to other branches of the line and the encounters with unknown cousins and savoury eats made for such excitement. She dreams of escaping to India, and knows just enough of history to see how that history can be used to triumphantly legitimise her rebellion:

And then it would be announced in Assembly, how she was leaving them behind - Rafferty, Harris, the lot of them. She'd get her hair cut in advance, with a big fringe that spiked up a bit, and somehow get hold of a ra-ra skirt. When the list was read out at the end for football, table tennis and all that extra-curricular stuff, she'd raise her hand.

She's get up and say, "Yes, I have an announcement. I'm moving to a country where people laugh and have fun and aren't cruel and rude and don't make a joke of you, and where they are more intelligent than people here, especially at maths like me. And I'm never coming back. And also, by the way, my mum and dad say that British people stole all these stones from people in India, the rubies and diamonds in the precious buildings, before they stopped ruling it [...]. So it doesn't make much sense for me to live here, to be honest, because I don't agree with it. I'm going back to where I came from.

She knew that she would have to make sure she was in a place where she could look at Simon Bridgeman and Christopher Palmer during this last bit, to give them a signal so they didn't take it personally. Or maybe she'd warn them in advance, so that the shock of what she was about to reveal, about their own history as British people, didn't upset them too much.

This is really a complex triple-sided point, because while Rumi registers her protest at the British, and amusingly leaves out the two boys in her class who are friendly with her, we can see from above her that what she wants to escape, ironically, is not so much Britain as her own, resolutely Indian, family in Britain.

Not all of Gifted is as good as this. If Lalwani's contention, through the tracking of her protagonist at different stages of her childhood and adolescence, is that Indian parents, even highly educated ones, often don't know how to deal with their children as they grow older, infantilising them and denying matters like their growing awareness of their sexuality, then to my mind her book to some extent duplicates these faults this by managing the protagonist less well she grows older. I was wearied in particular by the repeated descriptions of the teenaged Rumi's obsession with chewing cumin seeds. But there is a great deal of genuinely lively and vibrant writing in this novel, to go with its diagnosis of a major faultline in Indian society.

And old posts about two other works of comic fiction that have something to say about the encounter between imperial and colonised cultures: Fakir Mohan Senapati's Six Acres and a Third and Parashuram's "The Scripture Read Backwards".

The art of oratory, and the great speeches of modern India

This is the third of an informal series of pieces to mark the 60th anniversary of Indian independence. The first two are on Jawaharlal Nehru as a writer of English prose and on Rajmohan Gandhi's biography of Mahatma Gandhi.

Words are the basic currency of human communication, and if in one enduring form words are worked into stories, into literature, then in another more immediate and practical form they take the shape of rhetoric, or speeches expressly designed to make arguments and persuade people. In the decades leading up to Indian independence and just after public speaking took on a special urgency and force, as revealed by the wealth of Indian speeches from this period anthologized in two recent collections, Rakesh Batabyal's The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches and Rudrangshu Mukherjee's Great Speeches of Modern India.

India is an orator's country. Traditionally we were an oral culture, passing on our heritage by word of mouth rather than written records. Even today, after nearly two centuries of modernization and the spread of literacy, India remains a resolutely oral and visual culture, now boosted by the new mass media. From the streetside incandescence of trade union leaders to the honeyed discourses and grim jeremiads of saints and godmen of all stripes, the intense and unflagging verbosity of characters in our movies to the ingenious pitches for magic pens and ginger drops by wandering salesmen on Mumbai locals, everywhere in India the art and practice of oratory is alive and well. We are a people who revel in garrulity and cannot countenance silence.

Neither Batabyal nor Mukherjee rove as widely as they could have, choosing, perhaps because of constraints of space, speeches made mostly in formal settings like parliaments and courtrooms and grouped around significant themes. There is, for instance, not a genuinely funny speech in either book. But both anthologies have their share of thrilling passages, some, like Jawaharlal Nehru's "tryst with destiny" speech, familiar to all Indians, and others dredged out from the back-rooms of history. My selections here are intended to illustrate certain themes and patterns in these books and also some general aspects of the art of oratory.

For instance, the speech made by a man sentenced in a courtroom is a tradition that goes back to Socrates. Its appeal lies in the fact that justice is seen, by both the speaker and at least a part of the audience, to have been denied in the very house of justice. As the British government took to arresting and incarcerating large numbers of Indian protestors in the non-cooperation and independence movements, there naturally arose many occasions for condemned men to take the rule of law to task.

Two such speeches from the 1920s demonstrate the range of approaches used to discomfit the authorities. The more ingenious one was devised, not surprisingly, by Mahatma Gandhi, at his historic trial before Justice Robert Broomfield at Ahmedabad in 1922 after the suspension of the non-cooperation movement because of outbreaks of violence in parts of the country. After the prosecutor had made his case, Gandhi disarmed the judge completely by agreeing that he was guilty but at the same time arguing for the morality of his actions. Gandhi says:

I would like to state that I entirely endorse the learned advocate general's remarks in connection with my humble self. I think he was entirely fair to me in all the statements that he has made, because it is very true and I have no desire whatsoever to conceal from this court the fact that to preach disaffection towards the existing system of Government has become almost a passion with me [...]

It is the most painful duty with me but I have to discharge that duty knowing the responsibility that rests upon me, and I wish to endorse all the blame that the learned advocate general has thrown on my shoulders in connection with the Bombay, the Madras and the Chauri Chaura occurrences [...]

I wanted to avoid violence. I want to avoid violence. Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed. But I had to make my choice. [...] I know that my people have sometimes gone mad; I am deeply sorry for it.

I am therefore here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not ask for any extenuating act of clemency. I am here to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law in a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you, the judge, is as I am just going to say in my statement, either to resign your post or inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people of this country and that my activity is therefore injurious to the public weal.

The judge could not of course in good conscience believe this, and in sentencing Gandhi he remarked that if that sentence were later to be commuted, "no one will be better pleased than I". Here, as on many other occasions in the years to come, Gandhi's speeches were marked less by strident sloganeering or an appeal to emotions than by what the historian Simon Schama calls one of the elements indispensable to great oratory: "integrity of personal conviction, the sound of what Cicero, after the Greeks, called ethos".

A few months later the Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam struck a more dramatic tone than Gandhi - even a melodramatic tone - in another courtroom of the Raj at his trial on charges of sedition. On the day of his hearing the Kazi, later the national poet of Bangladesh, emphasised the gulf between what he called the king's law and God's law, between justice and Justice. He thundered:

The message of the king is like bubbles; mine - the boundless ocean. I'm a poet, sent by God to speak the unspoken Truth, to give form to the formless creation. The message is the revelation of the Truth, the message of God. That message may be judged seditious in a state-court, but in the court of Justice, that message is not against Justice, not against Truth [...]

I'm the shower of Truth, tears of God. I have not rebelled against a mere king, I have rebelled against injustice.

I know and I have seen - I'm not alone standing convicted in this court today. Standing behind me is the beauteous Truth, God Himself. Throughout ages He stands quietly behind His soldiers of Truth turned political prisoners. Through farcical trials like this when Jesus was crucified, Gandhi was imprisoned, that day too God stood quietly behind them. The judge could not see Him. Between him and God stood the emperor.

I hear that my judge is a poet. I'm delighted! A rebel-poet is to be judged by a judge-poet! But the last boat at the day's end is calling this elderly judge whereas, red-dawn's naba shankha is here to greet my coming. Death is calling him, life is calling me. I can't tell whether our respective setting star and rising star will unite. Nah, I'm talking nonsense again.

It should not be seen as an aspersion on the justice of his cause when I say that the Kazi does here seem to enjoy the sound of his own voice, the messianic tone of which sometimes bubbles over into an unintentional comedy. If there is indubitably in the words of the good Kazi, as those of Gandhi, the sound of ethos, there is also mixed in with it the equally distinctive sound of bathos.

Speeches are often meant to rouse or inflame; they are what turn a group of individuals into a mob. A characteristic method of doing so is to draw upon history and myth, the sense of a past or an injury shared by the speaker and his audience. Where the speaker wants to argue for the legitimacy of his actions, the past supplies true or false precedents for his stance and helps him align himself within a tradition.

An example of this is a speech chosen by Mukherjee called "Why I Killed Gandhi", delivered by the assassin Nathuram Godse in a packed courtroom in Simla in May 1949. Godse advanced the injured pride of Indian Hindus as his reason for eliminating Gandhi, and declared his hostility towards what he saw as Gandhi's emasculating creed of nonviolence:

Since the year 1920, that is, after the demise of Lokamanya Tilak, Gandhiji's influence in the Congress first increased and then becam supreme. His activities for public awakening were phenomenal in their intensity and were reinforced by the slogan of truth and non-violence which he paraded ostentatiously before the country.

No sensible or enlightened person could object to those slogans. In fact there is nothing new or original in them. They are implicit in every constitutional public movement. But it is nothing but a mere dream if you imagine that the bulk of mankind is, or can ever become, capable of scrupulous adherence to these lofty principles in its normal life from day to day.

In fact, honour, duty and love of one's own kith and kin and country might often compel us to disregard non-violence and to use force. I could never concede that an armed resistance to an aggression is unjust. I would consider it a religious and moral duty to resist and, if possible, to overpower such an enemy by use of force.

Rama killed Ravana in a tumultuous fight and relieved Sita. Krishna killed Kansa to end his wickedness, and Arjuna had to fight and slay quite a number of his friends and relations including the revered Bhishma because the latter was on the side of the aggressor.It is my firm belief that in dubbing Rama, Krishna and Arjuna as guilty of violence, the Mahatma betrayed a total ignorance of the springs of human action.

Note how, in the process of positing Gandhi as opposed to the glorious tradition of Rama, Krishna and Arjuna, Godse subliminally advances the idea that he himself has carried on the tradition of their heroism. There is something tragic about these words - tragic that a man should be shot because of his insistence on the nation's "scrupulous adherence to these lofty principles in its normal life" and his supposed ignorance of "the springs of human action", but tragic also that a man could kill for these reasons, genuinely believing himself to be in the right. But the springs of Godse's thought, the shape of his logic, have also undeniably run deep in India over the last sixty years, and especially since the early nineties

But if oratory often ends up appealing to chauvinist sentiments, then it can also be a force for broadening boundaries and forging connections. Among twentieth-century Indians who demonstrated and advocated an openness to, and not a distrust of, the wider world the most prominent are Jawaharlal Nehru, Satyajit Ray and Amartya Sen. If in many of his speeches Nehru spoke passionately of an independent and inclusive India, then he was also the first to warn that nationalism could be a straitjacket. And Ray, like Nehru, was a citizen of the world as much as he was a citizen of India.

Looking back at Ray's legacy in a speech given in 1995 called "Satyajit Ray and the art of Universalism: Our Culture, Their Culture", Sen remarked:

In Ray's films and in his writings, we find explorations of at least three general themes on cultures and their interrelations: the importance of distinctions between different local cultures and their respective individualities; the necessity of understanding the heterogeneous character of each local culture (even the culture of a common, not to mention a region or a country); and the great need for intercultural communication, attended by a recognition of the barriers that make intercultural communication a hard task.[...]

In emphasizing the need to honor the individuality of each culture, Ray saw no reason for closing the doors to the outside world. [At the same time] Ray appreciated the importance of heterogeneity within local communities. This perception contrasts sharply with the tendency of many communitarians, religious and secular, who are willing to break up the nation into communities and then stop dead there: "thus far and no further." The great filmmaker's eagerness to seek the larger unit — to talk to the whole world — went well with his enthusiasm for understanding the smallest of the small — the individuality, ultimately, of each person. [...]

While Ray insists on retaining the real cultural features of the society that he portrays, his view of India — even his view of Bengal — recognizes a complex reality, with immense heterogeneity at every level. It is not the picture of a stylized East meeting a stereotypical West, which has been the
stock-in-trade of so many recent writings critical of "Westernization" and "modernity." Ray emphasized that the people who "inhabit" his films are complicated and extremely diverse. Take a single province: Bengal. Or, better still, take the city of Calcutta where I live and work. Accents here vary between one neighbourhood and another. Every educated Bengali peppers his native speech with a sprinkling of English words and phrases. Dress is not standardized. Although women generally prefer the sari, men wear clothes, which reflect the style of the thirteenth century or conform to the directives of the latest Esquire. The contrast between the rich and the poor is proverbial. Teenagers do the twist and drink Coke, while the devout Brahmin takes a dip in the Ganges and chants his mantras to the rising sun. It is important to note that the native culture which Ray stresses is not some pure vision of a tradition-bound society, but the heterogeneous lives and commitments of contemporary India. The recognition of this heterogeneity makes it immediately clear why Ray's focus on local culture cannot be readily seen as an "anti-modern" move. "Our culture" can draw on "their culture" and "their culture" can draw on "our culture".

This is a remarkably cogent and sophisticated series of insights, although, having heard Sen speak on several occasions, I can guess that despite the urgency of its critique of aspects of contemporary Indian thought it would have hardly been made in a lectern-thumping or hectoring fashion. This brings us to a valuable point made by Mukherjee, which is the distinction between great speakers and great speeches. "Great speakers do not always make great speeches," he writes. "The yardstick for judging the latter is whether the words retain their power with the passing of time. There is obviously a shadow between the power of oratory and the power of a text when it is read by subsequent generations."

And in a rare speech delivered in 1982 by the title "The Education of a Filmmaker", Ray himself demonstrated his universalism by speaking among other things of his love for the Italian neorealist filmmaker Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves. What is so wonderful about it? Ray says:

One quality which is sure to be found in a great work of cinema is the revelation of large truths in small details.[…] There is a scene in Bicycle Thieves where father and son go feverishly looking for a man they believe to have connections with the thief. In the process the two lose each other. Finding himself alone in a back street…Bruno is seen to approach a wall while unbuttoning his pants. But before he can do what he wishes to do, Ricci suddenly appears and calls out urgently. 'Bruno whirls around and runs to join his father, his urge unsatisfied.' This one detail brings home the implications of this desperate, daylong search more vividly than anything could have done.

[And] there's a scene towards the end where Ricci suddenly runs into the thief in front of the latter's house, pounces upon him, and demands that he hands back his bike. Hotly denying his guilt, the thief suddenly goes into an epileptic fit. As he sinks to the ground shaking and foaming at the mouth, his mother, who's been watching from an upstairs window, tosses pillows to put under his head. Meanwhile, Bruno has dragged along a policeman, whom Ricci now takes into the house to make a search. We see the miserable pigeonhole of a room where the mother cooks a meagre meal for the family of four. 'Instead of accusing him,' she says, 'why don't you find him a job?' The bike, however, is not found. As Ricci comes out of the house, he finds that the whole neighbourhood has turned against him....

Apart from adding dimension to the story, the film challenges our stock response of instant antipathy to a character who brings misery on the hero by an unsocial act. But so finely is the balance maintained that the incident doesn't lessen the calamity of the hero's loss. It merely makes the film a far richer experience than a conventional treatment would have done.

And finally, which of the two books to buy? Batabyal's is the longer and more comprehensive selection, Mukherjee's the more idiosyncratic and interesting - most of the work I've excerpted is from his anthology. I would be more partial to the Mukherjee were it not for the vexation provided by the text, which is littered with totally careless typos that a single diligent reading could have eliminated. Reading it I was often reminded of the highly flexible grammar and spelling of the competition success magazines I used to peruse in adolescence. So if you don't mind an error-strewn text then go for the Mukherjee; if you find these things annoying, as I do, then read the good bits of the Mukherjee in a bookshop and buy the Batabyal.

And here is a link to a splendid feature run several years ago by the Guardian: the text of, and commentary on, the greatest speeches of the twentieth century.

Me, Mint, me and me

This Saturday I happen to have a full-page piece in Mint on the art and practice of oratory in India, as exemplified by two worthy new collections of modern Indian speeches edited by Rudrangshu Mukerjee and Rakesh Batabyal.

So if you happen to be in Bombay or Delhi, you might want to actually buy the paper, not because of any remarkable quality in the work, but because for the first time Mint has requested a picture of my mug to prop up the piece. As I don't have my photo in the newpapers very often, and as I get excited easily, unsurprisingly I got excited about this, as anyone would in my place. And why shouldn't I, after all I've been through? I quickly sent them a photograph from an angle which, if not exactly flattering, at least didn't further damage the case of what Nature had already treated so unkindly, and when earlier this week I happened to pass by the office on my extensive travels around the city (from restaurant to restaurant, bar to bar, popping by sometimes at the place of a friend to eat and drink for free) I thought I'd pop in there too and have a preview of myself on the page.

Imagine my shock then (at least try) when I found that they'd decided to use not my actual photograph - a representation of me at one remove, as indeed all representation is by definition, but you won't get my precise point without this recourse to tautology - but an artist's reconstruction of my photograph, or Chandrahas Choudhury twice removed from himself, and looking mighty upset about it too.

As you already can tell if you've been paying attention, I was not pleased to see this reconstruction. To be fair, it did bear a striking resemblance to me. But the resemblance was not to the me of today, which I might have accepted, but instead to the probable me of ten years from now - old, haggard, wearied by continuous book reviewing on the one hand and by being ignored by pretty girls everywhere on the other and the carping of critics on the third - or have I scrambled my metaphor? This was transparently unfair: let down, and by my very own paper! I protested and protested, and even offered to re-do the page myself on QuarkExpress, but they said it was already closed, and no, I couldn't meet the artist. I had a black coffee, and left in a mood the same colour.

Anyway, as the wise Macbeth truly did say, what's done is done. This post is too, and I'm off now.

In Pragati

My review of Rajmohan Gandhi's biography of Mahatma Gandhi appears today in the August issue of Pragati, alongside pieces by Nitin Pai on India's vacillations over a free-market economy, Atanu Dey first on Indian villages and then on the state of education in India, and Ravikiran Rao on Arun Shourie's analysis of our flawed electoral system.

You can download the entire issue here.

Wislawa Szymborska, curious about everything

We are all wise, of course, but it takes considerable work to give voice to wisdom into a form free of condescension, disarming resistance through wit and perhaps warmth. Do such voices often seek to express themselves in verse? Perhaps not. As a rule poets tend, no doubt for reasons beyond their control, to encourage calumnies such as that perpetrated by the young Mark Twain, who, writing that a fire had destroyed his home, his happiness, his constitution, and his trunk, remarked that the loss of his happiness fazed him very little, "because, not being a poet, it could not be possible that melancholy would abide with me long".

Certainly it could not be said that melancholy is missing from the work of the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. The great devastations of war and politics in the twentieth century affected Poland more than most countries; "hatred, in our century./How lithely she takes high hurdles./How easy for her to pounce, to seize" writes Szymborska in one poem. But even so Szymborska remains, even at her advanced age, the most witty, spry and searching of contemporary poets. If there is a strong line of irony running through her poems, it is more warming than brooding. Her work is so accessible as to be almost conversational, yet there is a curiosity and metaphysical intelligence that informs even her simplest lines, and at the same time a happy engagement with the surface textures of ordinary existence and what lies just beneath them, binding day to day and life to life.

Here, for instance, is her delightful poem "Funeral", in a translation by Joanna Maria Trzeciak. It is a poem that has possibly as many speakers as it has lines:

Funeral
"so suddenly, who would've expected it"
"stress and cigarettes, I told him"
"not bad, thank you"
"unwrap these flowers"
"his brother's heart did him in too, must run in the family"
"I wouldn't have recognized you with that beard"
"it's his own fault, he was always getting himself into something"
"that new guy was supposed to speak. I don't see him anywhere"
"Kazek is in Warsaw, Tadek went abroad"
"you were the only one with enough sense to bring an umbrella"
"so what that he was the most talented of them all"
"it's a walk-through room, Baska won't go for it"
"sure he was right, but that still isn't really the reason"
"and a paint job on both doors, guess how much"
"two egg yolks, one tablespoon sugars"
"it was none of his business, why did he mess with it"
"only in blue, and in small sizes"
"five times with no answer"
"all right, I could have done it, but so could you have"
"good thing she had that part-time job"
"I don't know, maybe the relatives"
"the priest is a veritable Belmondo"
"I've never been to this part of the cemetery"
"I dreamed about him last week, something struck me"
"the daughter's not bad-looking"
"it happens to all of us"
"give my best to the widow, I have to make it to"
"it sounded much more solemn in Latin"
"it came and went"
"good-bye Ma'am"
"let's go grab a beer somewhere"
"call me, we'll talk"
"either No. 4 or 12"
"I'm going this way"
"we're not"

The mood of mourning, the freshened awareness of mortality, the words of commiseration expected in a funeral are there, but they are mixed in with trivial scraps of conversation. Even so sombre an occasion returns inevitably to the human mean; life goes on.

In "The Poet and the World", her Nobel Prize lecture of 1996. Szymborska says of the people she admires most:

inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."

This sentiment undergirds one of her best poems, titled, with her characteristic reticence, "A Few Words on the Soul". The translation is by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

A Few Words on the Soul

We have a soul at times.
No one's got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood's fears and raptures
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It's picky,
it doesn't like seeing us in crowds.
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren't two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we're sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when non one is looking.

It won't say where it comes from
or when it's taking off again,
though it's clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

What is so charming about this poem is the way the soul is imagined as a kind of dandy whimsical companion, always disappearing whenever something dull or routine is going on, and positively unhelpful whenever hard labour must be done. We are clearly elevated by it, yet strangely "it needs us/ for some reason too". The form of the poem and the details it picks on ("mirrors, which keep on working/even when no one is looking" - yes, that would impress the soul) is quite beautiful. We end up thinking that yes, we should be more hospitable to our souls.

Szymborska radiates the same charm and good humour in her exceptionally agile prose, of which she has written a good amount (for decades she wrote a newspaper column called "Nonrequired reading", the pieces from which are collected in a book by the same name). Here, for instance, are some highly entertaining excerpts from her columns for the newspaper Literary Life, in which she gives advice to novice poets. Although she is never condescending, she can be quite firm, and although there are no deliberate jokes here, lots of the answers are really quite funny, not to say insightful:

To Mr. K.K. from Bytom: "You treat free verse as a free-for-all. But poetry (whatever we may say) is, was, and will always be a game. And as every child knows, all games have rules. So why do the grown-ups forget?"

To Marek, of Warsaw: "We have a principle that all poems about spring are automatically disqualified. This topic no longer exists in poetry. It continues to thrive in life itself, of course. But these are two separate matters."

To Mr. Pal-Zet of Skarysko-Kam: "The poems you’ve sent suggest that you’ve failed to perceive a key difference between poetry and prose. For example, the poem entitled ‘Here’ is merely a modest prose description of a room and the furniture it holds. In prose such descriptions perform a specific function: they set the stage for the action to come. In a moment the doors will open, someone will enter, and something will take place. In poetry the description itself must ‘take place.’ Everything becomes significant, meaningful: the choice of images, their placement, the shape they take in words. The description of an ordinary room must become before our eyes the discovery of that room, and the emotion contained by that description must be shared by the readers. Otherwise, prose will stay prose, no matter how hard you work to break your sentences into lines of verse. And what’s worse, nothing happens afterwards."

The whole piece, "How To (and How Not To) Write Poetry", is here.

Here are some other beautiful Szymborska poems: "Consolation", in which she imagines what Charles Darwin must have liked to read ("Darwin./They say he read novels to relax,/But only certain kinds:/nothing that ended unhappily."), "A Cat In An Empty Apartment", and "The Three Oddest Words".

And some other posts on poets: "The sweet voice and harsh words of Osip Mandelstam", "Nazim Hikmet in prison", "The despair of Attila Jozsef", "Constantine Cavafy's City", "Antonio Machado's Eyes", "Dunya Mikhail's war against war", "Chess with Jorge Luis Borges", "Orhan Veli Kanik all of a sudden", and "Tigers in the poetry of William Blake and Salabega".

Unusual book of the month, and some thoughts on matters many

Just received in the post today: a marvellous volume called Polish Writers on Writing, one of a series of books called The Writer's World published by Trinity University Press. It's edited by the poet Adam Zagajewski, and contains fascinating essays by and correspondence between all the luminaries of the great pageant of twentieth-century Polish literature, including Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Zymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Witold Gombrowicz, and the utterly original short-story writer Bruno Schulz.

Schulz is found here arguing, "The life of the word consists in tensing and stretching itself toward a thousand connections, like the cut-up snake in the legend whose pieces search for each other in the dark.[...] Language is man's metaphysical organ.We usually regard the word as the shadow of reality, its symbol. The reverse of this statement would be more correct: reality is the shadow of the word."

On the arrival of this book I was immediately reminded of the time when, poking about in a second-hand bookshop in Bloomsbury in London last summer, I came across a book of essays called The Mature Laurel: Essays On Modern Polish Poetry.

I immediately realised that this rare volume might up the Seriousness of my book collection by a full percentage point, and so, impressed by essays with titles like "The Poet As Torturer" (wait, since when did APJ Abdul Kalam become a Polish poet?) and "The New Wave: A Non-Objective View", I bought it. Well, now it has the company of a brother book almost as serious, though probably a lot more readable, and all I need to do now is find meself a copy of Milosz's A History of Polish Literature to make me unbeatable on the subject within India. And from there I'll move slowly outwards, north and south, east and west, and have the whole world covered by the time I'm seventy.

And among other things, I've been rereading the essays in Jorge Luis Borges's Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, the memory of which and the loss of which I lamented in a post last year, and a new copy of which was sent to me by a very kind reader. Writing The Middle Stage is fun enough anyway, but such gestures fill my heart with love for all humanity, even Paulo Coelho.

And finally, for some time now I've been organizing all my essays on Indian literature into a sidebar you'll find on your left, and now there's quite a respectable set of them, from older essays on Saadat Hasan Manto, Amartya Sen, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Fakir Mohan Senapati and Dandin to more recent ones on Vikram Chandra, Krishna Kripalani, Raj Kamal Jha, Amitava Kumar and Parashuram.

And lastly, some other occasions when I've happened to have some thoughts: serious thoughts, in "Some thoughts on nearly popping it" and "The Kitab Literary Festival and a disquisition on boots"; and humorous thoughts, in "Some thoughts on artistic time and real time".